A culture blog.

Videogames

2018 was a good year for games. Red Dead Redemption II, oddly reluctantly and despite its overlong story, offered extended periods of exploratory calm that offered glimpses of gaming's true potential. Hollow Knight's Switch port paired a sublime game with the perfect platform, and offered a superlative sense of discovery and risk. Spider-Man wonderfully perfected its … Continue reading God of War – 2018’s Game of the Year

Scrabbling desperately through narrow tunnels gives way incrementally to empowered exploration and secret-sweeping in Team Cherry’s excellent Hollow Knight, re-released to fanfare on Switch. This is a medtroidvania dungeon-crawler that stands alongside greats of the genre. In a subterranean world of insects, players play a diminutive knight armed only with a rusted nail, who awakens … Continue reading Hollow Knight

David Cage’s reputation is a slippery thing; industry punching bag, egotistical oddity, potential visionary – all these labels swirl around him depending on the audience. His latest game, Detroit: Become Human has been welcomed as his most well-rounded and playable yet. His previous, Beyond: Two Souls, is a hot mess. Cage is clear in his … Continue reading Beyond: Two Souls

Gameplay excellence and narrative madness have been comfortable bedfellows for videogames over the decades. As the form found its feet, expectations of competent storytelling grew only slowly, and are still remarkably forgiving. Bayonetta and its sequel, re-released this year for Nintendo’s Switch, exemplify this divide. Their combo-chaining fighting gameplay is responsive and accessible, scaling to … Continue reading Bayonetta & Bayonetta 2

Subsurface Circular is a curious and promising artefact (now followed by Quarantine Circular) that layers simple visuals and effective sound onto what is essentially a nicely crafted linear text adventure. Circular’s world is one of ubiquitous automation; an underclass of variously sentient robots and AIs run manufacturing and processing functions for society, while only ‘management’ is left … Continue reading Subsurface Circular

Has a British country village ever been so lovingly constructed in virtual form? Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is a paean to community values, viewed through the lens of a John Wyndham-esque science fiction yarn. Dropped into the Shropshire, players find themselves exploring an entirely abandoned town in the 1980s. Guided by cryptic radio messages, they are … Continue reading Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture

God of War is a muscled and powerful game, though in some ways a disarmingly conservative one. Its decidedly more low-key continuation of the tale of Kratos, Ghost of Sparta, dials down the outrageous fury of its predecessors, telling a more restrained tale of parenthood and acceptance. We rejoin Kratos an indeterminate amount of time after … Continue reading God of War

In the early days of online multiplayer gaming, being able to re-examine one's failures was nonexistent gameplay factor. In your Quakes and Unreal Tournaments, death was a momentary break, and the manner in which one died was relegated to a verbal description – fragged, sniped, you name it, because the games did. With the advent of widely-played shooters … Continue reading Killcams to streaming – the changing face of defeat

Nintendo's freshly announced Labo, a cardboard construction-set-cum-videogame, looks like the purest playset, real or concept, to have emerged from a mainstream game developer in recent years. It is a return to the age of wonder, a product that, even in the world of bemusing consumer technology, makes little to no sense to the layperson. Labo … Continue reading Nintendo Labo – the magic of play

Steamworld Dig was a jewel of a game, initially hidden on the 3DS, before spreading to every platform under the sun, accompanied by a magma flow of praise. Now, some four years later, a sequel arrives, perfectly and immediately suited to the Nintendo Switch. This time we play as Dorothy, a supporting character from the first … Continue reading Steamworld Dig 2